When was Easter again?  Thank you all for waiting so patiently for us to get our act together.  As it is, the only way I got out of giving the boys a bath tonight was to promise to write this post.  :)

Our Easter adventure comprised of 3, no, make that 4 5 Easter egg hunts and many practice hunts.  The weather Easter weekend was spectacular – sunny with no rain.  You couldn’t ask for better weather here in the Pacific Northwest.  Anyway, the weekend before, we had attended a very rainy Easter Egg festival put on by the twin mom group I belong to.  At that wet hunt, a fellow twin mom told us about the one in Mill Creek the next week.  Upon waking up Saturday morning and finding it a beautiful day, we thought we would check it out.  WOW – so did everyone else.

Two football fields at a local middle school were roped off and plastic eggs were dumped everywhere.  One was for babies to 2 year olds and the other was for 3 to 4 year olds.  Following those groups in the next half hour, were to be the older kids.  No one seemed to follow direction and everyone just lined up around the caution tape.  It was literally a 10 second count down and run for it.  I figured just the kids would go, but no, the parents were out there too.  Nicholas and Dexter stood still with a look of shock on their faces.  I grabbed their hands and we tried to find an egg.  Each boy ended up with 1 egg and a couple of pieces of candy we found on the ground.  I’m not joking when I say all the eggs were gone in 3 minutes.  Joel had to actually stare down a ~7 year old kid who tried to take the one egg Dexter got to.

Needless to say, that was our first and last big egg hunt experience.  The boys didn’t seem to mind that much but it did take us about 5 minutes to convince them that they did in fact, not want to stand in an hour long line in order to jump in a bouncy house for a couple of minutes.

That afternoon, Joel, Nicholas and Dexter attended the 1st birthday of a little boy we liked to call Baby Cai (now known as Big Guy Cai), while I stayed home and prepped for Easter.  Do you know how hard it is to put Lego people together and stuff into eggs quickly because you know the garage door will open at any moment?  Heads were flying everywhere.  Luckily, I didn’t get caught.  In the end, naps were skipped and the day ended early.  ;)  Thank God – because we had to help the Easter Bunny clean up and hide eggs.  That was a long day and a very short night.

Guess who woke up way too early?  I think we got the wake up call around 6am that morning.  We set the boys up in our bed, found the Thomas episodes on You-Tube, I took my shower while Joel got the boys snack cups.  This was their perfect morning.  Finally, we were all dressed and ready to go downstairs.

Joel forgot to tell the Easter Bunny to wipe his rabbit’s feet off by the front door.

We made the mistake of letting the boys dive into their Easter baskets first.

Dexter was so enamored by Nigel Gearsly (Cars II racing car) that he forgot to hunt for Easter eggs.

I think Nicholas dumped eggs into Dexter’s basket twice because his basket got too full.  It was odd, because with all of the other egg hunts Nic just kind of stood around and looked wherever Dex had just found an egg.

Seriously, Dexter could not put down that car.

Here you also see Joel dividing all the colored eggs evenly.

Each color had a specific item in it – green eggs had quarters, blue eggs, stickers, pink eggs – candy, yellow eggs – Lego people, etc….  The gal who gives me my allergy shots gave me that idea.

Oh, and to top things off, Easter just isn’t complete until you get a black eye.

That’s dedication to the search is what that is.  Poor Nicky.  He hit the corner of the train table looking for an egg that Malina hid.  (Now Malina would tell you we told her to hide it there but really, who are you going to believe?)  ;)

Pictures not shown – we went to church.  The boys loved the music.  They refused to climb through a Papier-mâché tomb which made the congregation smile (okay, so I corrected this one for Katie – she wrote “paper machete”, which I am choosing to mention because I think it perfectly reasonable for the boys to decline any request to climb through a machete of any form).  Maybe next year…..   And they went on their 4th egg hunt.  This time the eggs contained puzzle pieces that when put together, made a map to the location of the burried egg treasure.  This way it didn’t matter how many eggs any one child found – everyone had to work together, and everyone got the same prize.  I thought the idea was brilliant.

Then it was off to my parents’ house for food, festivities, and the last egg hunt of the weekend.  Dexter got back into the hunting groove and located quite a few eggs.

Nicholas and my dad tried to capture a Kodac moment.

Uncle Too Tall had the boys laughing up a storm.

My mom, as always, served up a delicious meal – with TWO PIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   And here they conned their Dad into reading them their new Mater’s Tall Tales book (courtesy of Malina-bunny) for maybe the fifth time…

It was a lovely Easter.  

The next day, Dexter told us we needed to take down our Easter decorations.  No rest for the weary.